Notes 8 feedback

Notes/Domino 8 Forum

Subject: Notes 8 feedback

Feedback Type: Comment

Product Area: Notes 8 Client

Technical Area: User Interface

Platform: ALL

Release: Beta 2

Reproducible: Not applicable

Greetings Lotus team. I downloaded and installed the beta on a little test system over the weekend and played around with it for a few hours. Unfortunately I only got to mess around with the client UI for an hour or so, so I can't comment on the server or designer side of things yet.

Installation

It went without a hitch. I just upgrade my test server running on Windows 2000 Pro and notes 6.5x and it upgraded without a single problem. I then upgrade my workstation (also a W2K machine) and it upgraded without a single problem. Major kudos to the install team that put this together. I was expecting a TON of problems.
On my W2K boxes the app is very sluggish but I'm figuring this is beta debugging turned on and speed will increase at release time? Also, the memory usage of the client seems a lot higher!

General

I really like the way you can just search for a database to open via the "Open" button. This will easily get rid of the need to have a huge workspace with tons of tabs to hold all your DB icons.
With the cool new search feature in the Open button, it would be really nice after I do a search that I could just down arrow to select DB and then hit enter to open up that DB. Currently you have to search, and then once it finds the DB you want, you have to mouse up and click on the link. For us keyboard users, I would like to type, down arrow and enter OR, if it is the only DB found (i.e. not more then one) then open the DB when I press enter so I don't even have to down arrow. Basically I like the way Firefox does its' type ahead feature in the address bar and would like to see this match theirs.
The icons for the bullets number list is hard to read and see. Many of my older users will have trouble distinguishing between these icons and the other formatting icons such as center, left, right, etc.
I like the in-line spell check a lot.
I like the day at a glance side bar and how it always stays open. We finally have a use for those dumb wide-screen monitors that the industry is pushing on us!
I like how the tabs are at the top with the contextual menus below it. I think end users will have an easier time understanding how/why these menus change depending on what tab they are in.
There's still kind of an odd mix of "old school" Notes and the new look. For example, old-school initial password box with square corners meets nice soft round corners of new client. Another example, delivery options of a new mail memo in old gray color with square corners, while actual email is softer and more up to date.
I like the search field on the right hand side of the context menus. It makes it nice to find that one message you need to reference real quick while typing a message. This will probably increase server load though as now more users will search their entire email for the one email that they know is sitting in their in-box and they could retrieve quicker if they weren't so lazy.
I love the show thumbnails view, and I was surprised how fast it was.
I _do not_ like how every time I open up Notes 8, it not only opens the Home page but also my email, calendar and contacts. This is a huge waste of time and resources. I've tried to find the setting to turn off the automatic opening of the three tabs other then home, but I just can't find it.
Running Lotus Notes from Network File Share
I cannot find in any documentation information regarding running your "key" notes files off of a network file server. Unfortunately you guys really missed the boat here. Instead of making sure you can have roaming users via a network file share, you opted instead to put all your effort into the "Roaming Profile" done directly via notes. In addition, you like to hold on to the "It's a Microsoft issue because they stopped doing file-level reconnects in Windows 2000" too much if you have a clustered file server and you fail over from one node to the other. Let me explain why this is soooooo important to us Network Admin guys...
1. When running from a terminal server, I do not want to have to copy the user specific files to the local HD of the terminal server from the file server every time they log on. This is a waste of time, resource and is problematic as now I have to figure out how to copy them back to the network for permanent storage and to make available should they connect to another terminal server cluster member. Apparently you are "supporting" this in a Citrix environment, but the clients still crash frequently, especially with a cluster-node fail-over of the file server.
2. The current method you have employed, while supporting roaming users, is a huge waste of bandwidth. If I have a user that just wants to log on to a different machine, they now have to wait for their files to be pulled down from the Domino server. If their files were on a network drive, they would just have that drive mapped and be on their way, only utilizing the files and portion of the files that are needed to get what they need. I realize there is an argument that you create just as much network traffic as now the client uses the LAN all day long, but I would prefer that given all the other advantages and ability for users to log in to Notes quickly from various machines.
3. In a remote office that is across a slow WAN, your current Roaming Profile option is not even an option. There is now way I'm going to ask a remote location to wait 30 minutes while their profile is pulled from the Domino server over a 256k dedicated connection, just so they can check email. At these locations, we have or could deploy a local file server and have all their files on that. Their data could then easily be backed up and they can move from PC to PC without having to take up WAN bandwidth and waste time to pull down the user specific files.
4. We could finally support users with a PC at their desk, and also a terminal services account, all via the network file share. We could store their files on the file share for their PC, and if they log in from home then they could have these same files available to them in their terminal services environment.
  
  Honestly, I cannot beg and plead enough at how important this is. Just look through the old forums, EVERYONE has asked for this if not for Terminal Services alone. Your current Roaming Profile has somewhat resolved the issue for some people, but the goofy thing is you spent all that time and only made about 1/3 of the people happy, whereas if you fixed your app so the files can be run from the network, you would have made more like 90% of the people happy.
  
  I kid you not, Lotus Notes is our most time-consuming application to setup for a new user and administer on a day to day basis of all the 1400 applications we support. Our struggles... Getting backups of key Notes data, restoring a Notes session after a PC failure, users wanting to log in on a different machine to check email and use Notes applications and initial setup of a Notes users. All of these could be greatly reduced if we could simply run the Notes files from the network reliably, and in a support fashion from Lotus. I do realize that this "CAN" be done today in an unsupported way, and we have tried. Unfortunately we have a clustered file server, and if you fail a cluster from one node to the next node, Lotus Notes bombs out and everyone has to either restart their client or restart their PC. So much for clustering your file server for guaranteed up time and ease of patching them!
Personal Addresses in Email DB.
This next topic could really be put in point above, but it is soooo important to me that I'm going to list it on a line item by itself. We N E E D the users personal address stored in the email file. I can't believe how ridiculous it is that the personal addresses are stored on the users local workstation in the names.nsf file. If the addresses were stored in the email file, then they would always have them, and they would always be backed up! Right now, my users no longer store personal address in their address book for fear of loosing the information. They understand the struggles with getting good backups of their names.nsf file (because we can't run them from the network file server) and as such, they are skiddish to use technology that is not 100% reliable in backing up their personal address book. The result, users are not using personal address and our IT department is not promoting the use of the technology. Now honestly, is that what IBM/Lotus wants? Do you really want the IT department telling users "be careful about storing address in your personal address book, as that is stored locally on your PC and we don't always get a good backup because the file is usually open when we go to back it up." This is another item that has been requested numerous times over the years and you guys are not fixing. I understand that you have a new (dumb) sync option that allows their address book data to be "sync'd" back to the domino server for backup. Why didn't you spend your time putting the addresses in the email file where they belong? Here's the best part, you are ALREADY DOING THIS IN iNOTES!!! In iNotes, you HAVE to do this, as a user doesn't have any local files (like they way it should be.) Just move this code over into the client world, and we'll be all set! It is bad enough having to deal with password issues where we can't reset the password from the server (because of the cool ability to work off-line), let alone having to deal with local files that need to be backed up.

Mail

When you open up an email and you try to scroll down using your mouse scroll button, it ends up scrolling the header portion of the email and not the body. This means you have to click in the body in order to scroll down. I'm guessing the initial focus of the cursor just needs to be moved to the body field?
I would like to see more of a distinguishing border between the header of the email and the body. It makes it a little easier to visually see the difference after you have been scrolling all around the page that has lots of horizontal lines on it.
I like how the "New" button provides new options for all types of entries, not just an email.
I like the "additional mail options" and how they keep their setting for each time you create a new message.
I really miss the CC: and BCC: fields when you are reading messages you have received. I received an email via BCC and I had NO indication as to why I had received it. When my users get a BCC document, and it doesn't say it was BCC'd to them, they are going to call our help desk.

Calendar

On the calendar entry privacy... For years I have really wanted to see an additional level of privacy control. Specifically, it would be nice if a document could be open to the public, private to MY team, and then private to me. I can't tell you how many times I would have liked my team to see when/where I was, but I didn't want it publicized to the world. My only options were to mark it as private or available to all.
When you have a meeting/all day event that spans numerous days, I would really like to see the graphical display of this be completely connected and not separate little boxes on each day. In other words, it should be one nice long box that physically runs over the days that the event is for. This makes it that much easier to see, visually, if your or someone has a single event that spans multiple days, otherwise you have to go by the name of the event alone.
The default mini-month calendar in the main calendar view displays with Saturday and Sunday being at the end of the week (i.e. the last columns) and yet all calendar picker-windows have Sunday in the 1st column or the beginning of the week. I know for sure I have some users that will find this confusing as it lacks consistency across all mini-calendar views. Pick one and stick with it, with my preference being Sunday at the beginning of the week.
The "One Month" view is horrible.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see any real distinguishing background colors for the events, only the color of the font is different. Again, for multi-day events, there needs to be more of a "box" that spans across all the days so that it is easier to see visually when someone is tide up for multiple days. I can whip up a screenshot with my ideas on this if it would be helpful.
I really like the old style calendar look where there was a "light blue" line where the day of the month went. This created a nice visual que to help separate out the days from one to the other, and one week to the next. The current format is just so plain and uninteresting.
Is it just me or do the "Calendar Entry Colors" in the preferences not match what you are seeing on the screen?
In general, I like the way the month calendar frameset looks in the old 7.x template.